Outbound Mail Auditing

Spammer tactics and zombie machines imperil Internet Service Providers by making their servers vulnerable to blacklisting. Blacklisting can severely disrupt a customer's daily operations and trash the ISP's brand, eroding all of the trust and goodwill that has been painstakingly earned. As a result, ISPs are keenly interested in auditing outbound email flows to block spam and enforce service level commitments.

WIShost Total Control addresses these urgent needs by inspecting outbound messages using pattern matching, statistical heuristics, and fingerprint filtering and scanning techniques. As outbound mail is received from ISP servers, WIShost accepts and pre-processes each message in its inbound queue, passing it through a series of checks to determine conformance with message size and volume limits, to identify message type (for example, to isolate bounce messages to avoid “blowback spam”), and to scan for spam and viruses. Each outbound message is then routed according to its categorization. For example, policy-offending or suspicious mail is placed in a quarantine queue, while non-delivery receipts are routed through a server that is dedicated to such traffic, so that if that server becomes blacklisted, it won’t jeopardize the ISP’s operations. Messages found to be spam or to contain viruses are also placed in the quarantine.
 
When a message fails a security or policy check, the network administrator is automatically alerted to the offending or suspicious content. These alerts specify the reason for placing the message in the quarantine, for instance, because the message content exceeded a size or “spamminess” threshold set by the ISP, or it contained a virus, or the volume of mail from the specific sender exceeded the ISP's message rate over time threshold. These alerts can be customized by the ISP, as appropriate for their policies. From these alerts, administrators can take several actions, such as releasing a specific message for delivery, vaporizing the message, or logging into the WIShost administration console to dispatch multiple messages. In addition to alerting, WIShost provides an optional branded bounce notification to the end-user, to inform him or her of a violation of ISP policy or a contractual stipulation, such as a limit on the amount of email that can be sent during a 30 day trial period.
 
WIShost provides the capability to implement rate limiting for individual users, blended with content and domain filtering, and controlled through a user interface. For example, if a user sends 20,000 messages in a specified time period, x% of which exceeds a pre-set content scoring threshold, WIShost will queue the message as suspicious and send an automated alert to the ISP for review.
 
WIShost will also profile the standard email usage patterns of individual users and compile a report. This report can help to identify suspect senders or zombie PCs so that the ISP can take necessary steps, such as contacting and/or canceling the customer in order to avoid any damage to the IP addresses owned by the ISP.
  
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